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Overachiever, and proud of it

John Preston

ONCE, a long time ago now, a couple called Homer and Marge had a
son. Later on, this boy would be joined by two sisters, Lisa and
Maggie. But first of all Homer and Marge had to decide what name to
give their new son. So they ran through a list, drew up their
favourites and eventually plumped for … Matt.

Fifty-five years on, Matt Groening is in Cannes to receive a
clutch of awards to mark The Simpsons' 20th anniversary.
Cannes has gone Simpsons-mad for the occasion. The hotel that
Groening is staying in is bathed in a sulphurous yellow glow at
night - the same colour as the family's skin - while huge posters
of Homer, Maggie, Bart et cetera stare down from billboards all
over town.

Groening himself is an unlikely looking focus for all this
attention. A burly man in baggy jeans and short-sleeved shirt with
curtains of greying hair falling either side of his face, he gazes
around in an owlish sort of way, blinking uncertainly behind his
round glasses. He appears to be a little dazed by all the attention
and also genuinely thrilled by it. As he told the Mayor of Cannes,
who amid great ceremony that morning presented him with a giant
styrofoam key to the town, he doesn't normally get out much: ''This
is my vacation, you see.''

For the past 20 years, Groening - pronounced Graining - has
scarcely paused to drink in the plaudits. Along with the team of 50
or so people who produce The Simpsons, he's kept his head
down, working away obsessively.

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But in that 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. What
started life as a hurried doodle on an office pad, a fictionalised
version of Groening's own family, has turned into the most readily
identifiable family in the world. It's also become the
longest-running comedy in television history. Everyone from Beijing
to Baton Rouge has succumbed to The Simpsons' magic.

Back when he made those first tentative sketches, Groening was
Bart - he only stopped short of calling the character Matt because
he thought it would be unduly egotistical. Instead, he plumped for
an anagram of brat. Now, two decades on, he's found himself turning
into Homer - not just the character, but also to some extent Homer
Groening, his father, who was also a cartoonist. If this wasn't
complicated enough, Matt Groening has a son called Homer, although,
for understandable reasons Homer Groening jnr now prefers to be
known as Will.

As well as having the same bulky frame and broad gap between
their upper lips and their noses, I'm heartened to be able to
report that Matt Groening and his most famous creation plainly
share similar appetites too. Walking into the hotel room where our
interview is to take place, Groening heads straight for the table
of food that has been laid out specially. After gazing at it for
several seconds with a connoisseur's eye, he takes one, then two
croissants, dunking them into his cup of coffee as he talks.

But while Homer has always been heroically untroubled by his
girth, Groening gives the impression of being less at ease in his
own skin. At the same time, it's plain that he has - and has always
had - enormous confidence in his own abilities. When, in 1985, he
was first asked to come up with ideas for little cartoon interludes
on The Tracy Ullman Show, the initial proposal was that
Groening should produce an animated version of Life in Hell,
his newspaper strip about a group of morosely dysfunctional
rabbits.

While he sat waiting to go into a meeting with the show's
producer, James L. Brooks, Groening suddenly became worried he
might lose the copyright to Life in Hell if he turned it
into a cartoon. It would be much safer, he figured, if he came up
with something else. So he took out his pen and started frantically
sketching away. By the time the meeting started a few minutes
later, The Simpsons had taken rudimentary shape.

As the slots he had to fill were only 15 seconds long, they
didn't offer much opportunity for creative experimentation - or
didn't appear to. But Groening didn't just have an exuberantly rich
imagination; he had grand ambitions to match.

''I always had this fantasy that the cartoons in my head would
be liked by other people,'' he says carefully parting his curtains
of hair. ''At the same time, I was this underground cartoonist
whose career thus far offered absolutely no clues that anything
like that was going to happen.'' Abruptly and unexpectedly,
Groening laughs. ''Ho! Ho! Ho!'' he goes. ''Looking back, I think I
had completely unjustified self-confidence. It might not have
worked out, of course. And I didn't necessarily think it would. I
certainly didn't think it would be my ticket to stardom, or
anything like that. But I did feel this is what I have to do
… I just had this conviction that I had to carry on doing it
and see what happened.''

Shortly before that first meeting, Groening had been reading a
magazine article about the three most iconic images of the 20th
century. One was the CBS logo, another was Hitler's moustache and
the third was Mickey Mouse.

''When I came up with The Simpsons, that was a very
deliberate attempt to follow in the footsteps of Walt Disney. For
instance, I made Bart like Mickey Mouse in the sense that he would
always be recognisable in silhouette. It was the same thing with
the yellow skin. That wasn't my idea - one of the early animators
did it. At first I didn't like the idea, but then it occurred to me
that if anyone happened to be idly watching the television and they
caught a glimpse of this very distinctive yellow, they'd know
exactly what they were looking at.''

From the start, Groening was adamant that this was to be a world
with clearly defined parameters. ''Yes, crazy things could happen
to the characters, but they had to react in the same way that a
person would react in such a situation. When they hurt themselves,
they really feel pain. This was my golden rule.'' To everyone's
surprise - except possibly Groening's - his 15-second slots for
Tracy Ullman proved hugely popular when they started airing in
1987.

''There was no time to explore character in depth, or anything
like that. Instead, I focused on physical mayhem. But for me it was
a great learning experience.'' The fledgling Fox Broadcasting
Company decided to commission a Christmas show and on December 17,
1989, The Simpsons appeared in their first half-hour
special, Simpson Roasting on an Open Fire. By then, Groening
was keenly aware of the commercial potential of what he was
doing.

''I know I like stuff that very few other people are going to
enjoy. And then I like very mainstream stuff. As an experiment, I
wanted to see how far I could sneak the stuff I really liked into
mainstream culture. That was my goal. At the same time, I wanted
the show to appeal to as many people as possible.''

It didn't take long before The Simpsons became a colossal
hit. ''The first time it really struck me was when I was building
this house. I visited it one day and there was this Bart Simpson
graffiti on the side - except that nobody knew I was the owner of
the house. There was Bart graffiti springing up everywhere.''

Three years after its full-length debut, Bart T-shirts bearing
the slogan ''Underachiever and proud of it'' were selling a million
a day. Then there were the dolls, the board games, the mugs, the
beer mats. In the first 14 months, The Simpsons
merchandising generated $2.1 billion in revenue.

All this must have been extremely strange for the real Homer and
Marge back at the Groening family home in Portland, Oregon -
especially as Matt had often had an awkward relationship with his
father. When Matt was a teenager, Homer Groening had looked at some
of his drawings and told him he would never make it as a
cartoonist.

I'm assuming that must have been a huge incentive for you to try
to prove yourself? ''Of course!'' Groening says. ''My father was a
real man's man, you know. He was a B17 bomber pilot in the war,
stationed in England. So I grew up with this very intimidating,
tough act to follow. The nice thing was that he would leave his
pens out for me to play with. But then he was not particularly
approving of what I came up with.''

Do you think he was disturbed by you becoming a cartoonist? ''Um
… I think … um, yes,'' Groening says. ''I think he was.
I just don't think he believed I had the talent. And like a lot of
parents, he didn't want me to be hurt. It's odd because now I have
two sons, one of whom is 18 and one who is 20. If anything, I've
gone the other way and I think I'm overly enthusiastic about what
they do. The trouble is that just irritates them, too.'' He gives a
helpless shrug and another booming Santa laugh. ''What can you
do?''

Groening grew up in an era that attached an enormously high
premium to prosperity and job security. Life was correspondingly
hard for those who fell short of their own - or their family's -
expectations. At school, Groening was so moved by Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman that he wrote him a fan letter. ''I was
enormously influenced by that and by Joseph Heller's novel,
Something Happened. Both of them had these central
characters who'd lost all faith in corporate America. When I
started to explore Homer's character in The Simpsons, it
seemed much more interesting that instead of being the usual
go-getter, he should be one of those people for whom life goes by.
Someone who is constantly being kicked in the a---, but doesn't
quite realise it.''

When he left college, Groening's first job was as a rock
journalist. But his musical tastes were so obscure that the only
way he could persuade people to buy the records he liked was to
make his reviews as funny as possible. ''That was when I started
trying to be funny and actually it worked quite well. But I
realised I could never be a truly good journalist because I didn't
have the patience to do what you're doing. There was nothing more
dispiriting to me than looking at a tape-recorder at the end of an
interview and thinking: 'Argh, I've got to transcribe that.' ''

For the next 10 years, Groening listened to Captain Beefheart
albums and drew Life in Hell. Although he was over 30 by the
time he dreamt up The Simpsons, he still had enough
childhood angst swirling around his system to enable him to slip
into Bart's skin without any difficulty.

''In the early cartoons, Homer was much meaner and disapproving
towards Bart. But I also had this idea which didn't pan out in the
end. I wanted Homer to be really irritated with his son because
Bart had no respect for him. And Homer was also ashamed because he
had this secret job - he was Krusty the Clown. Bart really
worshipped Krusty, but Homer could never tell his son that was
really him …'' You don't need a master's in psychology to see
where this had sprung from.

Once again, Groening hooks the hair out of his eyes. Afterwards,
he pauses for several seconds. ''Looking back …'' he begins.
''Well, I think there was quite a lot in there that I wasn't
necessarily aware of at the time.''

Since then, of course, he has become not just wildly successful,
but fabulously wealthy, too. Not that you'd ever guess it to look
at him. He admits the subject of money always makes him feel
awkward.

''I don't think there's anything good for making art about being
comfortable. It seems like the best art always comes from struggle.
And maybe I have inherited that spartan disciplinarian work ethic
from my father - someone who worked hard his whole life and didn't
have an enormous amount to show for it.'' Groening lives well, if
not lavishly, in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, a short drive away from
The Simpsons' production office. As for what there is of his
personal life - Groening and his wife Deborah divorced in 1999
after 13 years of marriage - that gets crammed into the narrow gaps
between his work.

Groening has presided over almost 450 shows so far and still has
a few ambitions left unfulfilled. ''My ultimate goal is to offend
every country in the world.'' Some time in the next few years
The Simpsons will take a final bow, although he insists he
can't yet see the end in sight. When Bart skateboards off into the
sunset for the last time, Groening says he'll feel sad, even
bereft, but he won't repine for long - he'll just get stuck into
something else instead.

''I don't know what else to do with myself. That's the truth.''
Groening leans forward, looking at my tape-recorder spinning round
and round. He shakes his head. Then he pulls out his wallet and
gives me his card. ''If you need anything else, let me know,'' he
says. ''I used to be you, you see.''